Changing Attitudes towards Female Athletes: Role of the Media

Length: 1000-1500 words excluding bibliography/works cited/references. In other words, 4-6 double-spaced pages.
Formatting: 12 point font, Times New Roman or Times.
Students will write a PROPOSAL to research a topic. This will essentially read like the first half of a typical scholarly article including a bit of the methods section without talking about any findings or results.
Try to write it out with the following typical sections of a journal article in mind:
1. Introduction: First paragraph is usually a hook to get the reader interested. The introduction is like a brief summary of what makes the topic interesting (worth researching or needing further research), what your research would contribute, and how you will conduct the study (eg. collecting newspaper articles to look at framing, etc.). Normally a brief statement of findings would go here but since you won't have any analysis or findings as it's a proposal, we won't include that.
2. Literature review: You should aim to use a minimum of 3 scholarly sources here (this can include sources outside of our readings). Newspaper articles, social media, or things that are not peer-reviewed by the scholarly community do not count toward the 3. The aim of a literature review is to make it clear to the reader how the scholarly community thinks about a topic/issue (not moral attitude by the way, don't go into morality in the paper please) and what work has already been done on a topic and how it shapes your contribution.
3. Argument: this should be brief--1 paragraph at the end of the literature review. Basically, you're stating what you expect to find in this study.
4. Methods: There are really two parts here---what DATA you will collect or use and HOW you would analyze it. We'll only do the data section as the HOW to analyze part is probably too complicated. If you're looking to increase the word limit you can discuss analysis if you wish. Data should be as specific as possible. You can propose to use secondary data (i.e. data someone else collected and is publicly available) if you can find it or you can propose to collect your own. When I was doing interviews for my dissertation, my data section discussed a sampling frame for the criteria for selection in an interview, how I would contact them, how many I wanted to interview, and what questions I would ask them. If you're doing media framing then you probably want to discuss what newspapers or media sources you will select from, which articles you'll choose over what timeframe, and then how you would code them (i.e. look for common patterns of frames). The last thing you might suggest is a historical case (Jackie Robinson, Curt Flood, anything in sports you can think of), but even if you were to do this you would need to talk about something generalizable, like common media frames of Robinson's hearing at the HUAC. Here you would need to sample something like the top 10 media outlets in the US at the time over a period of 3 months during and after the HUAC testimony. Then propose to gather 20 articles from each and code them (20X10 = 200 articles).
This is an easy section to get 100% on, just remember that you must be DETAILED DETAILED DETAILED when talking about methods.
5. Works cited. Since you are required to use at least 3 scholarly sources, I expect to see at least 3 sources cited here. The works cited section does not contribute to the overall word count requirement. Failure to cite sources counts as plagiarism and results in an automatic "0."
What sort of topic should I choose?
I strongly suggest that students attempt to extend one of the major theories we have covered and attempt to apply it to a tangible sports outcome. For example, one might consider how socialization is different along class lines and how this produces different life patterns of engagement in/with sports between working class and upper class individuals.